Sascha Meinrath and Victor Pickard
Sascha Meinrath and Victor Pickard paper on The New Network Neutrality is next. Rough paraphrase of Victor's talk follows.
We're not just here to promote pro NN. We're trying to begin a conversation that assumes importance of current argument but tries to think about next steps in order to be proactive. People are paying attention, broad bipartisan coalitions are here — we need a springboard, and we're trying to work on one. NN is a battle worth fighting, but it's short-term. NN isn't alone as an issue — we still are way down in BB penetration. And lots of undemocratic trends. So we're broadening parameters to include a number of democratizing proposals.
A number of factors — reframing of debate, complexity, shifting allegiances — have separated democratic principles that should be considered together. We need new historicism. Need to look at last century and common carriage.
Paul Starr, Robert McChesney etc. show incumbents exploiting market advantages — to hurt universal service and innovation.
So we'd like to go beyond econ and tech to normative principles about the role of the internet in society. Need a renegotiated social contract with telecom providers. We have ten principles/policy points.
[Sascha takes over]
So we think status quo is lame and we're opening up even more - that explodes the notion of what neutral network is. We talk about historical precedents. What we've done wrong we know — so let's not do it again! We look at common carriage. While BrandX going on, we were saying NN was the big battle for 2006 — and we were right — but it was hard to get traction. And now we think NN is just the first step.
So ensuring that network operators must lease their lines to other operators, explicitly allowing municipalities to be players, is critical. We can't allow that kind of behavior. AT&T breakup etc. sets same conditions that we faced in 1908. AT&T destroyed many local carriers. Open architecture and open source development is important — a way to take control is to prevent access to hardware that might be perceived as open. We noticed that 80% of wireless hardware owned by one company….
In the wireless realm in particular, we're moving away from open protocols and standards. This has enormous implications for interconnectivity. End to end architecture fits into that. Maintaining an architecture that can allow for interconnectivity is important. Vital to notice that conspiracy theories are often right! see NSA and CALEA.
He notes that Royal Post allowed for de facto “deep packet inspection,” and our post was founded in reaction to that. If you allow people to inspect packets, and require a mandate that that be done, you'll make legitimate packet inspection much more difficult.
We know that Windows Vista has DRM. We know that allowing discrimination here will allow blocking of VoIP.
We must remove notion that it's okay to remove the net bias of creating circumstances - conflation - of paying for premium services v. discrimination against those who do not pay for premium service. These are two different things. We need required minimums.
Interoperability is important. Systems need to talk to one another, and not be proprietary. Too many actors are creating path-dependency.
Business-model neutrality. Sascha is concerned about discriminating against municipalities.
Internationalization. Also important to avoid American-centric management (notes ICANN).
Asks for feedback.
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